De Zwaan Windmill

By the mid-twentieth century, the Netherlands had grown protective of its historic windmills as national treasures and generally forbade their export. When the city of Holland sought an authentic windmill for its heritage celebrations in the 1960s, the Dutch government made a rare exception, allowing one aging mill to leave the country on the condition that it be properly cared for.

That mill was De Zwaan, built in the Netherlands in the 1700s. It was carefully taken apart, shipped across the ocean, and reassembled in Holland by a Dutch millwright, becoming the only authentic Dutch windmill in the United States. Its arrival was a landmark event for a community that had never lost pride in its origins.

What makes De Zwaan special is that it still works. When the wind is right and the sails are set, the mill grinds grain into flour using its original mechanism, and that stone-ground flour is often sold to visitors, a rare chance to take home something made by a genuine historic windmill.

The mill has been carefully restored and maintained over the years, with a certified miller operating it, keeping alive skills that have all but vanished. Climbing its interior stairs, you can see the great wooden gears and grinding stones and understand how these machines powered daily life across the Low Countries for centuries.

The mill anchors Windmill Island Gardens, a city park laid out to evoke a Dutch landscape, with canals, dikes, tulip beds, and manicured gardens. In spring the grounds erupt in color during Holland's Tulip Time festival, when hundreds of thousands of tulips bloom across the town and the island is at its most spectacular.

The park adds to the Dutch atmosphere with a hand-carved Dutch carousel, an antique street organ, and buildings styled after the old country, sometimes with costumed guides in traditional dress and wooden shoes. It is a small, immersive slice of the Netherlands set down in west Michigan.

The city of Holland was founded in 1847 by Dutch religious separatists seeking a new home in America, and it has kept its heritage vividly alive ever since. The walkable downtown, famous for its heated sidewalks that melt away winter snow, hosts the massive Tulip Time festival each spring, and the Big Red lighthouse guards the channel where the Macatawa River meets Lake Michigan.

This shoreline is Anishinaabe homeland, long the country of the Odawa (Ottawa) and their Ojibwe (Chippewa) and Potawatomi relatives of the Three Fires Confederacy, whose descendants remain in Michigan today. Their communities lived and traveled along the Lake Michigan coast and the Macatawa River for generations before the Dutch settlers arrived in the 1840s.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.